Psilocybin Santa (Part 4)

That evening, while feasting on a vegan lasagna and drinking a local ale, Santa outlined his mission to the Misers. They merely nodded and smiled during the presentation. The Big (now jolly again) Man was on board! Nothing could stop them now.

Santa said he’d lifted his plan from an old and aborted Cold War CIA scheme to contaminate Moscow’s water supply with LSD. He’d read about in a history of bizarre CIA operations. Most were bungled with astonishing incompetence or abandoned altogether at the last minute, but Santa knew he could pull it off. You simply fly over all the uncovered reservoirs and drop in the mushrooms. Several days later and everyone is lightly dosed and nudged to open the doors of perception and some basic human decency.

When Santa had finished, Heat pointed out they only had enough stock to dose half the continental United States.

“Fine,” said Santa. “We’ll start with Red states. They need it more than any place on Earth. Alabama is first.”

The next morning, Santa and the Misers went to work loading up the sleigh and poring over maps. It was like preparing for a great battle in the current American Civil War that would one day result in a lasting peace and release the fear, anger, paranoia and terrible darkness that had engulfed so many Red state citizens. After an initial dosing, Santa would take to social media and talk radio and spread the gospel. Obviously a single dose, even a massive one wasn’t going to be nearly enough to transform the average American hate machine into something decent, but it was a subtle initiative, a quiet inauguration, and Santa was ready for the long haul always required to enact positive change.

It was finally Christmas Eve and Santa grabbed the reins of the sleigh, stood up, made his signature call to the reindeer, and the mission was launched. Drizzle fell as he lifted off with the Misers fist pumping and hooting and hollering below him to send him into the sky on his merry way. They also gifted him a special psilocybin Ding Dong. As soon as the sleigh was well into the clouds, Santa pushed in his favorite Christmas album into the cassette deck, the unreleased and long lost Sammy Davis record that should have been a classic. How Santa got a copy of it, well, Santa has his mysterious ways when it comes to procuring unreleased Christmas music. “Christmas Time All Over the World” blasted on and Sammie never sounded so good doing his hepcat thing.

Santa peeled the tin foil off the Ding Dong and chomped into the creamy filling. Delicious!

Somewhere over Central Oregon, Santa turned off the the Christmas music and turned on the radio. It was one of his favorite things to do while working on Christmas Eve, picking up a real live JD in a studio in the middle of nowhere still playing songs he dug and not chosen by a damn algorithm.

It was just outside La Grande when Santa heard a voice, a real languid, stoner-of-a-voice, announce that he was through playing Christmas music for the rest of the night and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On would lilt up the airways for the next 24 hours because, “This album is the answer to all America’s problems. It poses all the right questions. It is our new Bible and Constitution so toss the other ones in the fire and let’s start over starting right now!”

Santa had never heard the record. It came on. So did the mushrooms.

The jazzy and relaxed intro to track one danced out of the speakers…then Marvin began singing:

Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, eh eh

It started snowing but Santa could still see traces of the moon. Marvin was singing truth and Santa heard it infiltrate every atom of his being. Every line was like throwing a large stone into a placid lake and hearing the deep kerplunk of knowing, watching it ripple outward. The world needed to hear Marvin’s truth and let it ripple. They didn’t need truth coming from politicians or the pulpit. Look where that has got us.

Santa kept flying. Snow kept falling. Marvin kept crooning. The mushrooms jingled and jangled. It was going to be one helluva groovy night over Red state America.

And that was only the beginning.